Quick Facts
- Unravel the mystery of the disappearance of bones on the battlefield of Waterloo: industrial development has made bones valuable
- Google's New Algorithm Improves AI's 'Confident'
- Without improved testing programs, the number of people with prostate cancer worldwide will double
- Any material can generate electricity from moist air
- Stable perovskite solar cells with an efficiency of more than 25.6%.
Academic headlines
1. Unravel the mystery of the missing bones on the battlefield of Waterloo: Industrial development has made bones valuable
On June 18, 1815, a world-famous battle broke out in the small town of Waterloo, south of Brussels, where the Anglo-Dutch army and the Prussian army under the command of the Duke of Wellington faced the French army at Waterloo. The two sides invested about 190,000 troops on the battlefield of Waterloo, including 70,156 troops of the French army and 124836 of the total strength of the anti-French coalition army. But in 2012, archaeologists rummaged through the nearby land and found only 2 remains.
Previous speculation was that in modern times, it was discovered that bone grinding could be used as fertilizer, so the bones may have been dug up and used as fertilizer. However, the effect of this fertilizer is actually very average, and the missing bones are often mass graves, so it is impossible to increase the food cost so much. In a new book, Bernard Wilkin, a historian at Belgium's National Archives, and Arne Homann, archaeologist and director of the Salzgitter City Museum, argue that the massive demand from the nearby sugar industry is the main reason.
The battlefield of Waterloo became a hot spot for sugar beet production, with several sugar factories built on or near the battlefield.
图源：EDWIN TOOVEY
In the 1830s, Waterloo became a hotspot for sugar beet production, and a lot of bone char was used to produce sugar products from sugar beets – in modern sugar production, activated charcoal is used, which can be used to remove impurities such as pigments, proteins, oxides and other impurities from the syrup, thereby improving the purity and quality of sugar. At that time, the best thing to do was to use bone char, which required a lot of bones, whether animal or human. The high profits of the sugar industry led to an increase in the price of these production accessories, rising from 2 to 14 francs between 1832 and 1837 for 100 kilograms of bones.
The bones in the ground can be dug up and sold for money, and it is easy to understand what will happen. Interestingly, there are very few remains near famous battlefields of the 18th and 19th centuries, which are relatively late in modern times, but there are many remains from medieval battlefields. Researchers believe that this is because people at the time still remember where there were large-scale battles and a large number of bones, and what happened hundreds of years ago is really unknown.
Source:
https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-where-dead-went-did-grave-robbers-plunder-battlefields?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ScienceAdviser&utm_content=distillation&et_rid=1018944675&et_cid=5163251
2. Google's New Algorithm Improves AI's 'Confident'
Source: pixabay.com
The widespread use of large language models (LUs) has led to a salient problem: AI is only responsible for answering questions efficiently, but is not responsible for the outcome, which many people call "confident nonsense", and people have to spend a lot of effort to verify the details after receiving the answer.
To improve this problem and borrow from human workflows, Google's DeepMind team has developed an AI-based application called SAFE (Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator), a new AI system that can automatically check the answers given by LLMs and point out inaccuracies. The algorithm splits the objective facts from the answers provided by the original LLM and then uses Google search to find websites that can be used for verification and compares the two answers to determine accuracy.
In the test, the research team used SAFE to verify tens of thousands of facts given by multiple LLMs. When compared to the results of human fact-checkers, they found that the accuracy of SAFE matched the human results 72% of the time. In a test where there was a disagreement between SAFE and human verifiers, the researchers found that SAFE was 76% correct.
Reference Sources:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.18802
Previous Research
3.
Recently, the team of Dr. Nick James, Professor of Prostate and Bladder Cancer Research at the London Cancer Institute and Chief Clinical Oncologist at the Royal Marsden Cancer Centre, published the "Lancet Major Report on Prostate Cancer" (hereinafter referred to as the report) in The Lancet, pointing out that improving early detection and science programs will help prevent prostate cancer and save lives. This is particularly important for low- and middle-income countries, which will first face a significant increase in the number of prostate cancer cases in the future.
Although prostate cancer deaths have declined in most high-income countries since the mid-nineties, prostate cancer still accounts for 15% of all male cancers and is the most common male cancer in more than half of the world's countries. The report predicts that the number of prostate cancer cases globally will increase from 1.4 million per year in 2020 to 2.9 million per year in 2040, with the largest increase in low- and middle-income countries. At the same time, the number of people who die from prostate cancer each year worldwide will increase by 85% over 20 years, from 375,000 in 2020 to nearly 700,000 in 2040.
One of the main barriers to improving prostate cancer management in low- and middle-income countries is the lack of trained staff and specialized infrastructure. These shortages are not limited to prostate cancer, with a major 2015 Lancet report on surgery suggesting that 90% of people in low- and middle-income countries do not have access to basic surgical care.
Reference Sources:
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00651-2
4.
Source: Adv. Mater. 2024, 36, 2300748.
https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202300748
The team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that almost any material can be turned into a device that continuously collects electricity from moist air, as long as the surface of the material can be filled with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter, the study was published in Advanced Materials.
The principle is very simple – why do lightning appear in clouds? It's because the water droplets in the clouds are charged and discharged when the conditions are right. The key lies in a physical process: the distance traveled by a single molecule of a substance (in this case, water in the air) before it hits another single molecule of the same substance, and when the water molecules are suspended in the air, their average free path is about 100 nanometers.
Based on this principle, the researchers created a power collector in which a thin layer of material is covered with holes less than 110 nanometers in diameter that allow water molecules to pass from the upper part of the material to the lower part. But since each pore is so small, water molecules can easily hit the edge of the pore as they pass through the thin layer. This means that the upper part of the layer will be bombarded with more charged water molecules than the lower part, creating a charge imbalance, which will create an electric current. And on Earth, except in very extreme places, the humidity of the air will not be zero. As a result, this method can be operated almost around the clock, without the constraints of other renewable energy sources.
Reference Sources:
hTTPS://direct.mit.seven/qss/article/doi/10.1162/qss_a_00297/119840/author-mentions-in-science-news-reveal-widespred
5.
Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have great application prospects in the field of new generation photovoltaic power generation due to their excellent photoelectric properties and other characteristics, and have achieved a photoelectric conversion efficiency of more than 26%. However, the crystallization process of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites is complex. The involvement of intermediate phases, such as mixed solvent and δ phases, makes the preparation of homogeneous and highly crystallinity perovskite films challenging, and leads to lattice distortion, random orientation, and trapping center generation.
A research team composed of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua University has developed a multifunctional organic molecule, hydantoin, for the regulation of perovskite thin film crystallization. It is found that the synergistic effect of multiple functional groups of Hydantoin on perovskite precursors inhibits the formation of solvent intermediate phase and δ phase perovskite, forms perovskite films with high crystallinity and concentrated out-of-plane orientation of perovskite optically active phase, and inhibits a variety of defects and carrier non-radiative recombination. Perovskite solar cells with photoelectric conversion efficiency of more than 25.66% (certified as 25.15%) were prepared based on Hydantoin-assisted crystallization, which had good environmental stability. At a maximum power point output of 1600 hours under standard measurement conditions, the perovskite solar cells still maintain an initial efficiency of 96.8% and exhibit excellent ion migration inhibition effects. The co-regulation of perovskite crystallization and spatial orientation in this study provides a new way to promote the development of perovskite solar cells. The paper was published in Advanced Materials.
Reference Sources:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.202313673